by Chris Cander
In a slow-motion tumbling backward — doll over ankles, pinafore flying — Ruth’s eyes flew open and the doll rammed against her tiny chest from the sudden tug-of-war victory, and then they were both bump bump bump bump bump bump crash splat gone.
Myrthen stopped. Her movement, her breath. She stood at the top of the steps and stared, wild-eyed and speechless. A flash of lightning from the cellar window lit the floor: Ruth, splayed at the bottom of the stairs, one leg bent at a sickening angle; blood pooling beneath one ear; her eyes and her mouth with its perfect baby teeth, open; shattered glass and beans spilled across the dirt floor; the birthday doll lying a few feet away, likewise limp and torn.
“No!” Rachel shoved Myrthen aside with one arm and took the stairs in two lurching steps. “No!” She fell to her knees next to Ruth, and lifted her limp torso up against her own. The jar glass cut into Rachel’s knees like shrapnel, adding her blood to her daughter’s as she rocked back and forth, back and forth, begging and pleading with God.
Myrthen looked down, seeing only what the lightning allowed — her mother, rocking her limp twin, like she did when Ruth couldn’t easily fall asleep. Outside, the thunder gnashed and roared. Ruth was scared of thunder. Yes, she didn’t like the thunder or the rain or the dark. Mama was comforting her because she was scared, and she should go down and get her doll and give it to Ruth because it would make her feel better, wouldn’t it, Ruth? It was so dark outside, shepherds take warning, it was probably almost bedtime and she wasn’t hungry so she must have eaten and it was probably time to go to sleep.
“Mama, I’ll get our bed ready,” Myrthen called quietly down to her mother, who was still rocking, rocking with knees bleeding into the spill of blood where Ruth had fallen. Ruth looked so tired; they were both so very very tired, and Myrthen thought she should go and get their bed ready before it was past their bedtime and she heard the door begin to open — Papa’s home — and she didn’t want to be caught up late; it was so dark and Ruth was already fast asleep, so she ran, quickly, quietly to their room and pulled back the covers and climbed inside, and moved all the way to the wall so that Ruth would have enough room when her mother brought her sleeping body in.
She closed her eyes and promised God that when her mother finished her doll that night after the canning was done, she would give it and all the buttons to Ruthie.
Three days later, it was her birthday — their birthday — but there was no wreath on the table, no burning life candles, no colorful flowers. Instead, six-year-old Myrthen was eye-level with shades of gray. Her mother’s flannel dress. Her father’s threadbare suit, the one he had worn when they left Saxony for a better life. Father Timothy’s cassock. The clothes of mourners, the coal-dusted handkerchiefs that the adults pressed to their eyes.
Beyond them, the morning sky was complementary, with thick, dark clouds. Even the sounds were gray: the low drone of prayer, the sniffles, the throat-clearings, and the belching of the trains, heaving their heaping loads of slick coal down the mountain. But the darkest gray of all — the one from which Myrthen couldn’t tear her eyes — was the black casket that hovered over a fresh hole in the cemetery behind St. Michael’s.
“We therefore commit Ruth’s body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life,” Father Timothy said. Myrthen heard a steep pitch in her mother’s sobs, which sounded both raw and scabbed after three endless days. Myrthen had hardly seen her, but her crying had filled every crack in their small house. It was the sound to which she fell asleep, when she finally did in her suddenly wide bed; the sound to which she woke, always with a few groggy minutes before she remembered why.
Then Myrthen’s father and the other men stooped through her line of gray sight, and lowered her twin’s body into the ground. Poor Ruthie. Ruth didn’t like the dark. Maybe her eyes were closed; maybe she was playing hide-and-seek. Then she wouldn’t be scared. She always hid in the same place when they played that game, always under her parents’ bed. Myrthen always counted to ten before she went looking, and she had to act like she didn’t know where Ruth was. She looked in different places to keep the game fun, and Ruth always acted surprised when she finally found her.
Myrthen tugged on her aunt’s dark sleeve. “How many do I need to count?”
“Was ist das?” her aunt whispered down at her. Her mother’s sister, Agnes, and family — her husband, Ian, and their son, Liam — had joined them in Verra when the twins were two, but Agnes’s English still lagged behind.
“Until I can go get her?” Myrthen said, pointing to the hole.
“Shhh,” someone said, a man or a woman, Myrthen didn’t know. She hung her head, aching. The only sound besides Father Timothy’s dulled voice was the grasshoppers clacking, searching for their mates. The sound of loneliness. She didn’t know it then, but she would suffer that sound for the rest of her life.
May 21, 1925
“Alta! Stop that daydreaming,” Alta Krol’s mother called from the kitchen window into the late-May morning air. “Those weeds won’t pull themselves.”
“Yes, Mama,” she called back. Her mother set a piernik spice cake on the sill to cool, then waved the towel she was holding at her and turned away.
Alta stood up from her crouched position in between rows of lettuce and spinach, rhubarb and peas, and stretched to her new full height. The ground looked farther away again. Most mornings these days, her legs and back ached. She thought of her grandmother, the tiny, stooped figure with fingers like old tree roots and a pinched expression on her hard, lined face. She wondered if the old woman had ached like that all her life; wondered if she, Alta, now thirteen, would ache all her life, too.
Alta sighed, squatted back down, and forced her hands to perform this small duty. She moved aside the fragile, desirable leaves and, from underneath, pulled out the murderous weeds that threatened to deprive her family at the dinner table. A cool breeze cut through the sun’s warmth and raised bumps on her arms, making the short blonde hairs quiver. She stopped to watch her skin settle back down. With her eyes still on her own arm, she reached forward to lift the next tuft of green with one hand and stretched the other out in anticipation of a dandelion shoot. But it was no dandelion that met her fingertips. She yanked back her hand and fell onto the ground with a thump when she grabbed, instead, something with fur.
She blinked hard a few times and then, when nothing else moved, slowly pushed herself back onto her heels, her long legs bent like a grasshopper and her sharp knees pointing at the blue sky. Again she lifted the lettuce leaves, and she found splayed out the fresh-dead body of a small brown mouse.
No insect morticians had yet arrived to claim the body. There was no blood, no apparent cause of death. She rocked forward onto the balls of her feet and craned her head to see if there was anything on the other side of the mouse. She found no stick nearby with which to lift it, so she reached forward and touched it carefully with the end of her index finger. Nothing. Just a warm pelt, softer than she would have imagined. She reached out again and stroked it — first with just the one finger, then with two, then three, and finally, the whole flat of her open palm.
The mouse looked so peaceful lying there, curved in the lettuce shade as though taking a late-morning nap, its tail tucked around its long feet. She pulled up a tiny flower from within the rhubarbs and laid it across the mouse’s forepaws. If it wouldn’t cause her mother grief, Alta would have gone inside for her sketch paper and pencils to memorialize the dead mouse that looked so serene in his weed blossom funeral arrangement.
Alta looked up, thinking instead she should offer a prayer to send his poor, lonely soul up to Heaven. She wasn’t sure it would be considered appropriate, but it was the only ritual she knew for a moment such as this. That’s when she saw the scuds of steam rising into the sky above the valley, a chain of train-made clouds signaling that the passenger engine was coming. Was it already almost noon?
She aband
oned the mouse as quickly as she’d found it, and took off barefoot down the garden and up the slant of yard and past her own house and past the row of twenty-six company houses that made up her street.
The hard rains had stopped a few days before, but the dirt road was still muddy, especially along the sides. Even though she held it aloft, the hem of her dress would be filthy by the time she reached the station. Still, she wouldn’t slow down. She ran hard on her spindly legs, her feet flaring unskillfully out to the sides, keeping her pace by the trail of steam puffs, which she watched over her shoulder to make sure she was ahead of them. There were two reasons she wanted to meet the passenger engine at the yard: the Verra Bears were coming back from their away game after a two-month winning streak, and her uncle Punk and his new bride were arriving for a home visit from New York.
She beat the train to the small station house with just enough time to climb the few steps to the platform and lean forward to catch her heaving breath, her hands clutching the heavy fabric at her knees. The tracks, running parallel to New Creek, lay between Whisper Hollow — which was bursting into bloom with monkey flowers and pigeonwing vines, ginseng and buffalo clover — and the town of Verra, which was comprised of the coal tipple, the coal camps, the company store and a few other shops, the barber’s, the post office, and two schools. When she could breathe normally again, Alta stood under the noon-struck clock with her back to the town and waited for the passengers to spill off the train.
The station manager tucked his watch into his trouser pocket, adjusted his hat, and walked through a belch of steam to open the door. A few men stepped onto the platform first, stiff in their wool and blinking into the bright sunlight. Then an elderly woman clutching her daughter’s hand, who was in turn helped down the metal steps by a young man in steel-toed boots. Then the baseball players, smiling and proud, their uniforms packed into the cardboard suitcases they carried, descended into the small crowd waiting for them. Their mothers and a few fathers whose shifts in the mines had ended or else not yet begun, sweethearts, and classmates welcomed them home with claps on the back and demure smiles. When shortstop Giovanni Esposito stepped into the light and waved at Alta, she lost her breath again.
Giovanni, or John, as he was called, was fifteen, with dark, curly hair and a smile that turned his eyes into crescents. She’d never been close enough to know what color his eyes were and had never cared to find out until that moment, when they looked right at her. Unlike the other boys, whose faces were slick and spotty or darkened by coal dust, John’s complexion was clear and smooth, except for a small mole under his left eye near his nose and the shadowy beginning of facial hair. He was tall for his age, taller than the high school coach who was traveling with them, and his shoulders looked as strong as a grown man’s. Under the midday light, he resembled her image of Homer’s Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, about whom she’d read nightly for three weeks by candlelight the previous winter. That is, after her chores were done.
He waved again and shouted, “Hello there!” and Alta, suddenly smitten, tentatively raised her own hand to return the greeting. Why was he waving to her? Then, from behind her, another shout: “Hey, Johnny!” She felt the brush of a boy’s shoulder against hers as he moved toward John to pump his hand and offer congratulations on a game well played.
Embarrassed, she turned her face as though she hadn’t been staring, entranced, at the boy who in that moment became the most beautiful thing she’d seen in all her twelve years. When she moved her gaze beyond him, she found herself staring again, this time at the second-most-beautiful thing: the woman she assumed was her new aunt, Maggie.
Maggie stood so still amid the excited, doting movements of her uncle Punk that she seemed to be floating in the stir of air he whipped up around her. Alta watched as she reached inside her drawstring purse and pulled out a silver case. Maggie took out a cigarette and put it into the end of a long plastic holder. Punk quickly dug inside his pocket for a lighter, then made a cup against the wind to light it. She hardly moved, except to bring the cigarette slowly toward and away from her mouth, but Alta had the impression that all her movements would be as languid and graceful as a cat’s. Maggie waited as Punk collected their many suitcases from the baggage car, struggling under their weight and piling them next to her one by one. Each time he appeared, she beamed at him, but made no offer to help.
Alta had never seen a woman with such poise. Had never watched someone stand so elegantly and confidently still. Had never, ever seen a woman smoking a cigarette, nor wearing high-heeled shoes, flesh-colored stockings, a dress with a hem that barely covered her knees, dangling earrings, rouge. In the vague periphery of her vision, Alta realized that other people were staring at Maggie as well. She even heard an audible gasp from somewhere nearby. Nothing like this woman had ever happened to Verra, West Virginia, much less to Alta herself.
Finally, when Punk had gathered all their belongings, he looked around for his brother or nephews, but all he saw was Alta.
“Is that you, Alta?” he called across the platform. Alta came out of her reverie enough to nod. “Well, come on up here and meet your aunt Maggie!”
Alta walked the thirty or so feet without taking her eyes off her new aunt, then stopped in front of Maggie without saying a word.
“I swear you’re gonna be taller than any of us, you keep growin’ like you do,” Punk said; then he turned to Maggie. “This here’s Alta. My sister’s girl.” Then he slipped his arm around Maggie’s waist and looked into his wife’s sparkling eyes and said, “And this is the lovely Mrs. Maggie Borski.”
Maggie smiled at him and leaned away so she could transfer her cigarette from her right hand to her left, then she turned to Alta and extended her hand. Alta blinked in surprise; she’d never before shaken hands with a woman — or anyone, for that matter.
“How do you do?” Maggie said in a tone that was bouncier than Alta would have expected, given her molasses-coated gestures.
Alta slowly reached out and slipped her hand against Maggie’s. “Good,” she said.
Maggie laughed, still holding Alta’s hand, and looked her up and down. “You’re a dear!”
Alta smiled but became suddenly aware of herself under Maggie’s gaze. She looked down again and, with chagrin, observed the contrast between her aunt’s shiny leather Mary Janes that lifted her two inches off the ground and her own flat, bare, dirty feet. The mud had begun to dry and crack along the tops into brownish-gray contours like states on a map. She curled her toes, as though to help at least some of them secede from that unsightly union.
“Listen, do you like motion pictures?” Maggie asked.
Alta looked up. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Haven’t you ever seen one?”
Alta shook her head.
“Oh, you’ll love the pictures. We go all the time, don’t we, Punk?” From within her poised exterior, a girlish enthusiasm erupted. Maggie closed her eyes for a moment and smiled. “The Silver Palace. It’s simply divine,” she said, drawing out the last word. She looked back at Alta and continued. “You can see the picture screen from any of the seats, but I prefer the balcony. We just saw The Gold Rush and oh, that Charlie Chaplin! Isn’t he fantastic? The way he pretends to eat the shoe!” She looked at Punk and smiled with her mouth open, showing her small white teeth. He smiled encouragingly back at her. Then she took a draw on her cigarette, and leaned in toward Alta. “Listen, I’ll take you to one sometime, you and me, okay?”
Alta nodded, still bewildered by this elegant and unexpectedly friendly creature.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” Maggie asked, still smiling. She turned to Punk and said, “Baby, get me my train case, would you?” Punk held it out for her so she could unzip it without having to bend over. She took out a magazine with a picture of a dark-haired woman with fair skin and a rosebud smile that matched the background. She handed it to Alta.
“That’s Colleen Moore. She’s a screen star. Maybe I’ll take you
to see her in one of her pictures sometime.”
Alta looked at the magazine, its title Motion Picture, written in bubble letters above the date and price: May, 25ȼ “Thank you,” she said.
“Oh,” Maggie said, reaching into her bag. “Here.” She took out another cigarette and handed it to Alta. “Don’t smoke it yet. I’ll teach you how sometime.”
“Maggie!” Punk said. “She’s too young for all that. My sister’ll have my head you start her smokin’ cigarettes!”
“Oh, baby, it’s fine.” She put her hand on his coat sleeve, then turned to Alta and winked. “It’ll just be our secret, then, okay?”
Alta smiled, broadly now, and nodded again. “Our secret.” She slipped the cigarette into the pages of the magazine, which she hugged against her chest just in time to keep it out of her three brothers’ and other uncle’s view. They’d come to the station to help Punk and Maggie with their bags.
“Mama needs you home to help with dinner,” Alta’s eldest brother, Kasper, said to her as he passed, but he didn’t take his eyes off Maggie as he spoke. “Better get going.”
As they gathered around to shake Punk’s hand and meet Maggie, Alta stepped backward out of the throng, clutching the magazine, the smile beginning to slide back down into a neutral expression as she slipped out of Maggie’s glow. Between the dark-colored shirts of the men in her family, as if looking through fence posts, she could see Maggie lapse back into languor as she met each of them in turn.
Just before Alta reached the edge of the platform, Maggie, who was shaking the hand of one of her new relatives, dipped her head and winked at her. Alta winked back, then turned and ran barefoot through the mud again, all the way home.